Hope’s eyes were wide. “Yes. This burden must pass.” Pirius saw his lower lip was trembling.
Burden turned to Pirius. “I take it you’re not a believer.”
“No. And you’re very trusting to break Doctrine in front of three strangers.”
Burden shrugged. “Look around. What else can they do? And are you going to inform on me?”
“No,” said Pirius. He glanced at Hope, who was sitting on his bunk, face blank. “If you can keep him happy, that’s fine by me.”
“You’re loyal to your crew. And wise. I like that.”
“I don’t need your approval.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“And if I was wise I wouldn’t be here…”
Cohl yelped and sat up. She pointed at a row of bunks opposite. “Did you see that?”
Pirius turned, saw nothing. “What?”
“A rat!”
Burden laughed gustily. “Oh, you’ll soon get used to the rats!” A klaxon sounded harshly, and the lights briefly dipped to green. Burden said, “Have you eaten? How long were you traveling?… Well, it doesn’t matter. I’d advise you to get some sleep.”
“Why?”
Burden started pulling off his coverall. “You’ll need it. In the morning your training will start in earnest. It’s usually quieter in here at this hour; you created a stir.” He glanced at Pirius warningly. “This isn’t a pilot school. It’s not exactly intellectually demanding. But—”
“We already had a taste of it.” Pirius began to explore his grubby blankets, and wondered how he could get them washed.
He checked on his shipmates. Cohl, still curled up, might not have been sleeping, but if not she was faking it well. Enduring Hope, physically exhausted and now apparently emotionally drained by his meeting with this enigmatic spiritual leader, slumped into his bunk.
Pirius lay back and closed his eyes. But the light was shifting and bright, the noise clamoring and disorderly. He had never thought of an Arches Base Barracks Ball as particularly peaceful, but so it seemed compared to this. He forced his aching muscles to relax, and he tried not to count down the minutes until he had to rise again.
In the hour before reveille, the general clamor seemed to subside. The talking, screwing, and wrestling was done for the night, it seemed, and people were drifting into sleep.
And in that last still hour, Pirius heard an odd noise. It was a scratching, a rustle, a whisper. Then a soft piping rose up from all around the dorm, a chorus of tiny voices joined in near harmony.
Later, Burden told him it was the rats, calling to each other from around the barracks. Having traveled with humans twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth, the rats had learned to sing, and humans who had never heard birds had learned to enjoy their song. For the rats it was a survival tactic; they had become lovable.
When the klaxon sounded, the soft singing was overwhelmed.
Chapter 8
As Nilis’s corvette approached Sol system, even while it was still under FTL, it was bombarded by a whole series of Virtual messages. The Virtuals were like shrieking ghosts, liable to erupt into existence anywhere in the corvette at any time. Some of these messages were sanctioned by the various authorities; others, it seemed, were not, but had been able to punch their way through a Navy ship’s firewalls anyway. Torec was freaked by the whole experience.
It took Pirius Red some time to understand that many of these clamoring entreaties and demands were aimed, not at Nilis, but at him, the boy who had captured a Xeelee.
“Don’t let it worry you,” Nilis said with a smile. “You’re already famous, that’s all!”
Of course that was disturbing enough in itself. Pirius had always harbored a guilty desire to do something spectacular, to be remembered. But he didn’t want to be notorious for something he hadn’t done, and, now that history had been edited, never would.
And anyhow, personal fame was utterly non-Doctrinal. Pirius had expected that here, close to the center of humanity, adherence to the Doctrines would be stronger than ever. But that, it turned out, was naive.
“In many ways, things are simpler out where you come from,” Nilis said gently. “Here in Sol system, and especially on Earth — despite the best efforts of the Commission for Historical Truth — everything is very crowded, very old, and very messy. Nobody is in control, really, and never could be. You’ll see!”
Like much of what Nilis had to say to him, Pirius found it best not to think too hard about that. But the messages continued to come, and as the light of Sol grew brighter, his heart beat faster.
The corvette stopped briefly at Saturn. Pirius and Torec knew that name, for this immense gas giant had famously been requisitioned long ago by the Navy as its largest base in Sol system.
Pirius peered out in awe. Around the cloud-draped planet, ships and facilities orbited in swarms. Even the moons bristled with factories and weapons emplacements — though it turned out that many of the smaller moons had been broken up for raw materials, water-ice of mantles and rock of cores.
Nilis waxed nostalgic about this world. He even showed Pirius Virtuals of how it had been before the arrival of humans, when it had been circled by a spectacular system of ice rings. But the rings had been too tempting a mine for the first settlers of the system, and too fragile to withstand the fires of the first wars fought here.
Scenery didn’t interest Pirius much. As a Navy brat, he was much more intrigued by military hardware. So he watched a steady stream of ships plunging into the planet’s clouds. Nilis said that the ships were descending to Saturn’s rocky heart, itself a planetoid about the size of the Earth and immersed in a hydrogen ocean thousands of kilometers deep. In the atrocious conditions of that deep murk, out of sight even of the rest of humanity, huge machines were being built.
Earth, this remote speck of rock at the Galaxy’s rim, was still the logical center of humanity. The Interim Coalition of Governance exerted a tight control on a Galaxy full of human beings, and the epicenter of that control was here, on Earth. If worst came to worst — if the Xeelee ever broke out of the Galaxy’s Core and struck at Sol system itself — Saturn would be the bastion of the last defense of Earth, and those mighty engines would come to life.
The corvette was here because the Xeelee nightfighter captured by Pirius Blue had been hauled across the Galaxy and placed in orbit among Saturn’s moons.
“There was really no other choice,” Nilis murmured. “Bringing back a Xeelee has been enough of a sensation as it is. At least here it will be under Navy guard. If we took it deeper into the inner system we’d be asking for trouble.”
Pirius said, “You mean the risk to Earth would be too great?”
“Oh, no, Pirius, not that. We have come here not to protect mankind from our Xeelee, but to protect the Xeelee from us.” He winked.
After six hours, the corvette slid cautiously away from Saturn and its cordon of technology. As it was carrying celebrities of various degrees of reluctance, the corvette’s crew were granted permission to shorten the remainder of the trip by using their FTL drive within the boundaries of Sol system.
So Pirius saw Saturn wink out of existence, to be replaced immediately by a wall of light, blue- white, that flooded the corvette with dazzling brilliance.
At first Pirius and Torec couldn’t understand what they were seeing. It was an immense shield of blue-gray, almost like metal, that curved smoothly away on all sides. It even looked polished, for Pirius saw a dazzling highlight from the sun. And yet the surface was subtly textured, and there were flaws, darker masses scattered irregularly across the shining surface. Each such mass was surrounded by a fringe of paler blue, flecked with white. Other objects crawled across the shield, trailing arrow- shaped wakes behind them.